Jefferson Davis Quotes

The principle for which we contend is bound to reassert itself, though it may be at another time and in another form.

All we ask is to be let alone.

He is the kind of person I should expect to rescue one from a mad dog at any risk but then insist on a stoical indifference to the fright afterward." Jefferson Davis's future wife describing him at first meeting.

If the Confederacy falls, there should be written on its tombstone: Died of a theory.

I worked night and day for twelve years to prevent the war, but I could not. The North was mad and blind, would not let us govern ourselves, and so the war came.

I’m fonder of you than anybody on earth. I couldn’t tell you that in New York. It’d mean I was a faggot. That was what the Civil War was about. Abraham Lincoln was a faggot. He was in love with General Grant. So was Jefferson Davis. Lincoln just freed the slaves on a bet.

Here is my room, in the yellow lamplight and the space heater rumbling: Indian rug red as Cochise's blood, a desk with seven mystic drawers, a chair covered in material as velvety blue-black as Batman's cape, an aquarium holding tiny fish so pale you could see their hearts beat, the aforementioned dresser covered with decals from Revell model airplane kits, a bed with a quilt sewn by a relative of Jefferson Davis's, a closet, and the shelves, oh, yes, the shelves. The troves of treasure. On those shelves are stacks of me: hundreds of comic books- Justice League, Flash, Green Lantern, Batman, the Spirit, Blackhawk, Sgt. Rock and Easy Company, Aquaman, and the Fantastic Four... The shelves go on for miles and miles. My collection of marbles gleams in a mason jar. My dried cicada waits to sing again in the summer. My Duncan yo-yo that whistles except the string is broken and Dad's got to fix it.

The actual cabin fell into disrepair probably before Lincoln became president. According to research by D. T. Pitcaithley, the new cabin, a hoax built in 1894, was leased to two amusement park owners, went to Coney Island, where it got commingled with the birthplace cabin of Jefferson Davis (another hoax), and was finally shrunk to fit inside a marble pantheon in Kentucky, where, reassembled, it still stands.

Garfield's assassination attempt made "the whole nation care".

Not mine, oh, Lord, but thine.

James Buchanan's niece: "He often worked just for work's sake.

1881, two decades after his farewell speech to Congress, Jefferson Davis published a history of the Confederacy claiming that slavery had nothing to do with the Civil War

The war...must go on till the last man of this generation falls in his tracks...unless you acknowledge our right to self-government. We are not fighting for slavery. We are fighting for Independence, and that, or extermination, we will have.

Listen. You're a hell of a good guy, and I'm fonder of you than anybody on earth. I couldn't tell you that in New York. It'd mean I was a faggot. That was what the Civil War was about. Abraham Lincoln was a faggot. He was in love with General Grant. So was Jefferson Davis. Lincoln just freed the slaves on a bet. The Dred Scott case was framed by the Anti-Saloon League. Sex explains it all. The Colonel's Lady and Judy O'Grady are Lesbians under their skin. (101)

South during the Civil Rights Era. It was during this time that the birthday of Jefferson Davis, the president of the Confederacy, was added as a holiday in Alabama. Even today, banks, state offices, and state institutions shut down in his honor.

We know quite well that the people of the Northern States have not yet drunk of the cup -- they are still trying to hold it far from their lips -- which all the rest of the world see they nevertheless must drink of. We may have our own opinions about slavery; we may be for or against the South; but there is no doubt that Jefferson Davis and other leaders of the South have made an army; they are making, it appears, a navy; and they have made, what is more than either, they have made a nation.

Never be haughty to the humble; never be humble to the haughty. —Jefferson Davis

The past is dead; let it bury it's dead, its hopes and aspirations; before you lies the future. Let me beseech you to lay aside all rancor, all bitter sectional feeling, and to take your places in the ranks of those who will bring about a consummation devoutly to be wished--a reunited country.

Jefferson Davis gave on the floor of the US Senate on April 12, 1860. This future president of the Confederacy objected to a bill funding Black education in Washington, DC. “This Government was not founded by negroes nor for negroes,” but “by white men for white men,” Davis lectured his colleagues. The bill was based on the false notion of racial equality, he declared. The “inequality of the white and black races” was “stamped from the beginning.

Officers like Braxton Bragg and Jefferson Davis left the army to seek their fortunes with enslaved labor farms, but Lee was the only senior officer who was actually in charge of hundreds of enslaved workers and in the U.S. Army in 1861. By the time he chose succession, Lee identified far more with the southern slaveholding class than he did with his fellow officers. He certainly spent more time managing enslaved workers than he did leading soldiers.

Three of its greatest leaders and their horses have been carved into the north face. Jefferson Davis and his horse, Blackjack. Robert E. Lee and Traveller. Stonewall Jackson and Little Sorrel. Riding across the craggy granite, the immense figures are breathtaking. On

Sherman making a mockery of Confederate President Jefferson Davis’s recent assertion, while visiting the Rebel army, that the Yankees would have to retreat from Georgia or starve, and predicting that the retreat would be “more disastrous than was that of Napoleon from Moscow.

When Lincoln was running for the House of Representatives from Illinois, he was charged with being “a scoffer at religion,” wrote the historian William J. Wolf, because he belonged to no church. During the campaign, Lincoln attended a sermon delivered by his opponent in the race, Reverend Peter Cartwright, a Methodist evangelist. At a dramatic moment in his performance, Cartwright said, “All who do not wish to go to hell will stand.” Only Lincoln kept his seat. “May I inquire of you, Mr. Lincoln, where you are going?” the minister asked, glowering. “I am going to Congress” was the dry reply. When he was president, Lincoln also liked the story of a purported exchange about him and Jefferson Davis between two Quaker women on a train: “I think Jefferson will succeed,” the first said. “Why does thee think so?” “Because Jefferson is a praying man.” “And so is Abraham a praying man.” “Yes, but the Lord will think Abraham is joking.

Every time I returned home I would drive on streets named for those who thought of me as chattel. “Go straight for two miles on Robert E. Lee.” “Take a left on Jefferson Davis.” “Make the first right on Claiborne.” Translation: “Go straight for two miles on the general whose troops slaughtered hundreds of Black soldiers who were trying to surrender.” “Take a left on the president of the Confederacy, who understood the torture of Black bodies as the cornerstone of their new nation.” “Make the first right on the man who allowed the heads of rebelling slaves to be mounted on stakes in order to prevent other slaves from getting any ideas.

There was one vampire, however, who refused to leave… who believed that the dream of a nation of immortals was still within reach—so long as Abraham Lincoln was dead. His name was John Wilkes Booth. FIG.3E - JOHN WILKES BOOTH (SEATED) POSES FOR A PORTRAIT WITH CONFEDERATE PRESIDENT JEFFERSON DAVIS IN RICHMOND, CIRCA 1863.

The extraordinary outpouring of bipartisan concern blotted out the scandals of Grant’s presidency and restored him to his rightful niche in the American pantheon. Hundreds of sympathetic messages piled up at the Grant residence, including telegrams from Jefferson Davis and the sons of Robert E. Lee and Albert Sidney Johnston.

On May 13, he met the official announcement that England recognized the belligerency of the Confederacy. This beginning of a new education tore up by the roots nearly all that was left of Harvard College and Germany. He had to learn—the sooner the better—that his ideas were the reverse of truth; that in May, 1861, no one in England—literally no one—doubted that Jefferson Davis had made or would make a nation, and nearly all were glad of it, though not often saying so. They mostly imitated Palmerston who, according to Mr. Gladstone, “desired the severance as a diminution of a dangerous power, but prudently held his tongue.” The sentiment of anti-slavery had disappeared.

FALSE EQUIVALENCY If you compare the Koch brothers to George Soros and you compare MSNBC to FOX News then why not compare the NAACP to the Ku Klux Klan, George Washington to King George, Abraham Lincoln to Jefferson Davis, Barack Obama to Vladimir Putin; If you compare the Democratic party to the Republican party then why not compare Citizens United with Brown versus Board of Education, Churchill to Mussolini, Martin Luther King to George Wallace; If you compare Liberals to Conservatives then why not compare Boxing to Cage Fighting, Mozart to Salieri, Edward Kennedy Ellington to Lawrence Welk, Three Card Monty to Inside Trading, John Birks Gillespie to Cab Callaway; If you are mentally slothful enough to engage in false equivalency, why not go all the way? Pretend that ignorance equates with knowledge, Science with Mythology and empathy with apathy?

Cuba must be ours,” declared Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis. He also wanted the Yucatán peninsula, so that the Gulf of Mexico would become “a basin of water belonging to the United States.” His fellow Mississippian, Senator Albert Brown, coveted Central America. “I want these countries for the spread of slavery,” he said. “I would spread the blessings of slavery, like the religion of our Divine Master, to the uttermost ends of the earth.

In a similar way, General Robert E. Lee once spoke to the president of the Confederacy, Jefferson Davis, in the most glowing terms about a certain officer under his command. Another officer in attendance was astonished. “General,” he said, “do you not know that the man of whom you speak so highly is one of your bitterest enemies who misses no opportunity to malign you?” “Yes,” replied General Lee, “but the president asked my opinion of him; he did not ask for his opinion of me.

THE TITLE STAMPED FROM THE BEGINNING comes from a speech that Mississippi senator Jefferson Davis gave on the floor of the US Senate on April 12, 1860. This future president of the Confederacy objected to a bill funding Black education in Washington, DC. “This Government was not founded by negroes nor for negroes,” but “by white men for white men,” Davis lectured his colleagues. The bill was based on the false notion of racial equality, he declared. The “inequality of the white and black races” was “stamped from the beginning.”3

I gave the best and all my life to a girdled tree. It was live oak, and was good for any purpose, except for blossom and fruit, and I am not willing for Belle to be content with anything less than the whole of a man's heart. [Varina Davis, Letter to a friend, advising against his daughter Belle marrying a widower]

[B]iblical eschatology is fundamentally not a matter of calendar but of Christology. Developing an eschatological understanding is not a matter of assembling isolated texts in some artificial scheme, but rather one of gaining a comprehensive and integrated perspective of the sovereign God's purposes for human history.

The war had been about the most fundamental of things: slavery and freedom. William H. Seward had called the clash over chattel labor the “irrepressible conflict.” As the years passed after Appomattox, however, more and more Southerners sought to diminish the role of slavery in bringing about the clash of arms. In his memoirs, Jefferson Davis said the Confederacy sought to preserve not slavery but “the inalienable right of a people to change their government…to withdraw from a Union into which they had, as sovereign communities, voluntarily entered,” adding: “African servitude was in no wise the cause of the conflict, but only an incident.

It early became manifest that great reliance must be placed on the introduction of articles of prime necessity through the blockaded ports. A vessel, capable of stowing six hundred and fifty bales of cotton, was purchased by the agent in England, and kept running between Bermuda and Wilmington. Some fifteen to eighteen successive trips were made before she was captured. Another was added, which was equally successful. These vessels were long, low, rather narrow, and built for speed. They were mostly of pale sky-color, and, with their lights out and with fuel that made little smoke, they ran to and from Wilmington with considerable regularity.

I’m gonna make race the basis of politics in this state, and I’m gonna make it the basis of politics in this country.” Later, at his inaugural, he proclaimed, “I have stood where once Jefferson Davis stood, and took an oath to my people. It is very appropriate then that from this cradle of the Confederacy, this very heart of the great Anglo-Saxon Southland, that today we sound the drum for freedom … Let us rise to the call of freedom-loving blood that is in us … In the name of the greatest people that have ever trod this earth, I draw the line in the dust and toss the gauntlet before the feet of tyranny. And I say, segregation today! Segregation tomorrow! Segregation forever!

Whenever I thought about having a conversation with [the widow], my words felt like confederate currency to me, worthless, ineffectual, meaningless, and of no use to anyone in the present day. No matter how many portraits of Jefferson Davis I placed on the table before her, she would never feel like my debt was paid, my obligation met. [We] could never be even. No matter how fast I talked or how eloquently I crafted the English language, my words couldn't turn back the clock, reverse the bullets, and reunite her with her husband, the only actions that would truly right my mistake. I was a writer and I believed in the power of words, but my words were as useless now as the defunct currency of the Old South.

For the ammunition and equipment required for the infantry and artillery, a good laboratory and workshop had been established at Richmond. The arsenals were making preparations for furnishing ammunition and knapsacks; but generally, what little was done in this regard was for local purposes. Such was the general condition of ordnance and ordnance stores in May, 1861.

Read. You should read Bukowski and Ferlinghetti, read Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton, and listen to Coltrane, Nina Simone, Hank Williams, Loretta Lynn, Son House, Robert Johnson, Howlin’ Wolf, Lightnin’ Hopkins, Miles Davis, Lou Reed, Nick Drake, Bobbie Gentry, George Jones, Jimmy Reed, Odetta, Funkadelic, and Woody Guthrie. Drive across America. Ride trains. Fly to countries beyond your comfort zone. Try different things. Join hands across the water. Different foods. New tasks. Different menus and tastes. Talk with the guy who’s working in construction on your block, who’s working on the highway you’re traveling on. Speak with your neighbors. Get to know them. Practice civil disobedience. Try new resistance. Be part of the solution, not the problem. Don’t litter the earth, it’s the only one you have, learn to love her. Care for her. Learn another language. Trust your friends with kindness. You will need them one day. You will need earth one day. Do not fear death. There are worse things than death. Do not fear the reaper. Lie in the sunshine but from time to time let the neon light your way. ZZ Top, Jefferson Airplane, Spirit. Get a haircut. Dye your hair pink or blue. Do it for you. Wear eyeliner. Your eyes are the windows to your soul. Show them off. Wear a feather in your cap. Run around like the Mad Hatter. Perhaps he had the answer. Visit the desert. Go to the zoo. Go to a county fair. Ride the Ferris wheel. Ride a horse. Pet a pig. Ride a donkey. Protest against war. Put a peace symbol on your automobile. Drive a Volkswagen. Slow down for skateboarders. They might have the answers. Eat gingerbread men. Pray to the moon and the stars. God is out there somewhere. Don’t worry. You’ll find out where soon enough. Dance. Even if you don’t know how to dance. Read The Four Agreements. Read the Bible. Read the Bhagavad Gita. Join nothing. It won’t help. No games, no church, no religion, no yellow-brick road, no way to Oz. Wear beads. Watch a caterpillar in the sun.

Those Americans who have the power to end racism as we know it, to become tough on racism, and to build the postracial society that the postracialists actually don’t want to see—these people have known the facts throughout the storied lifetime of Angela Davis. Powerful Americans also knew the facts during the lifetimes of Cotton Mather, Thomas Jefferson, William Lloyd Garrison, and W. E. B. Du Bois. It is the primary job of the powerful to know the facts of America. So trying to educate knowledgeable people does not make much sense. Trying to educate these powerful producers or defenders or ignorers of American racism about its harmful effects is like trying to educate a group of business executives about how harmful their products are. They already know, and they don’t care enough to end the harm. History is clear. Sacrifice, uplift, persuasion, and education have not eradicated, are not eradicating, and will not eradicate racist ideas, let alone racist policies. Power will never self-sacrifice away from its self-interest. Power cannot be persuaded away from its self-interest. Power cannot be educated away from its self-interest. Those who have the power to abolish racial discrimination have not done so thus far, and they will never be persuaded or educated to do so as long as racism benefits them in some way.

Criticism of Davis was neither new nor unusual, for his Confederacy was by no means a monolithic state. Secession had been imposed upon many loyal Unionists in the South, devoted patriots who, though subdued, remained hostile to the Rebel government; Union conventions had been held in the Confederacy during the war, and thousands of Southerners served in Union armies out of conviction that slavery and secession were twin evils. Many more thousands deserted the Confederate army to spend most of the war at home or in hiding. The more numerous poor whites and small farmers, who owned no slaves and worked their own lands, usually despised the few wealthy planters who controlled the slave system and the political apparatus as well. North Carolina’s Governor Zebulon Vance, in his forthright fashion, had put this issue to Jefferson Davis himself in terms that had become a rallying cry: “It’s a rich man’s war and a poor man’s fight.

I thought myself better adapted to command in the field; and Mississippi had given me the position which I preferred to any other—the highest rank in her army. It was, therefore, that I afterward said, in an address delivered in the Capitol, before the Legislature of the State, with reference to my election to the Presidency of the Confederacy, that the duty to which I was thus called was temporary, and that I expected soon to be with the Army of Mississippi again.

Progressives today are quick to fault “America” for slavery and a host of other outrages. America did this, America did that. As we will see in this book, America didn’t do those things, the Democrats did. So the Democrats have cleverly foisted their sins on America, and then presented themselves as the messiahs offering redemption for those sins. It’s crazy, but it’s also ingenious. We have to give them credit for ingenuity. The second whitewash is to portray the Civil War entirely in terms of the North versus the South. The North is supposedly the anti-slavery side and the South is the pro-slavery side. A recent example is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s article about the Confederate battle flag in The Atlantic.3 Now of course there is an element of truth in this, in that the Civil War was fought between northern states and southern states. But this neat and convenient division ignores several important details. First, the defenders of the Confederate cause were, almost without exception, Democrats. Coates cites many malefactors from Senator Jefferson Davis to Senator James Henry Hammond to Georgia Governor Joseph Brown. Yet while identifying these men as southerners and Confederates, Coates omits to identify them as Democrats. Second, Coates and other progressives conveniently ignore the fact that northern Democrats were also protectors of slavery. We will see in this chapter how Stephen Douglas and other northern Democrats fought to protect slavery in the South and in the new territories. Moreover, the southerners who fought for the Confederacy cannot be said to have fought merely to protect slavery on their plantations. Indeed, fewer than one-third of white families in the South on the eve of the Civil War had slaves. Thus the rigid North-South interpretation of the Civil War conceals—and is intended to conceal—the active complicity of Democrats across the country to save, protect, and even extend the “peculiar institution.” As the Charleston Mercury editorialized during the secession debate, the duty of the South was to “rally under the banner of the Democratic Party which has recognized and supported . . . the rights of the South.”4 The real divide was between the Democratic Party as the upholder of slavery and the Republican Party as the adversary of slavery. All the figures who upheld and defended American slavery—Senators John C. Calhoun and Stephen Douglas, President James Buchanan, Supreme Court Chief Justice Roger Taney, architect of the Dred Scott decision, and the main leaders of the Confederacy—were Democrats. All the heroes of black emancipation—from the black abolitionists Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass, to the woman who organized the Underground Railroad, Harriet Tubman, to the leader whose actions finally destroyed American slavery, Abraham Lincoln—were Republicans. It is of the utmost importance to progressive propagandists to conceal or at least ignore this essential historical truth.

Liquor, guns, motorcycle helmets (legislation had gone back and forth on that)—mainly white masculine pursuits—are fairly unregulated. But for women and black men, regulation is greater. Within given parameters, federal law gives women the right to decide whether or not to abort a fetus. But the state of Louisiana has imposed restrictions on clinics offering the procedure, which, if upheld in the U.S. Supreme Court, would prevent all but one clinic, in New Orleans, from offering women access to it. Any adult in the state can also be jailed for transporting a teenager out of state for the purposes of an abortion if the teen has not informed her parents. Young black males are regulated too. Jefferson Davis Parish passed a bill banning the wearing of pants in public that revealed "skin beneath their waists or their underwear" and newspaper accounts featured images, taken from the back, of two black teenage boys exposing large portions of their undershorts. The parish imposed a $50 fine for a first offense and $100 for a second.

soldier named James A. Miller, of Harpers Ferry, had gotten drunk and shot and wounded his captain. An army court-martial had found him guilty and sentenced him to death by firing squad. Because Jackson was in a position to commute the sentence, a number of pleas for leniency were made to him on Miller’s behalf, including an impassioned one from Jackson’s friend Reverend James Graham. Jackson refused. He upheld the court-martial, and Miller was shot to death by the 2nd Virginia in Winchester on November 6. (It was later learned that Jefferson Davis, more sympathetic than his major general, actually did commute Miller’s sentence, but a messenger bearing his order got drunk and never delivered it.4) The men were learning quickly that, in Jackson’s command, unlike most of the rest of the army, or the army they thought they knew, there would be no bending of the rules. Jackson may have had trouble enforcing discipline in his section room with mischievous, fresh-faced college boys, but he had no trouble doing so in a rough army camp.

He’d ventured from the White House only to say goodbye to a former friend—Warren Davis of South Carolina, elected twice to Congress, once as an ally, a Jacksonian Democrat, the other as a Nullifier. His enemy, the former vice president John C. Calhoun, had concocted the Nullifier Party, its members actually believing that states could choose what federal laws they wanted to obey. The devil’s work was how he’d described such foolishness. There’d be no country if the Nullifiers had their way—which, he supposed, was their entire intent. Thankfully, the Constitution spoke of a unified government, not a loose league where everyone could do as they pleased. People, not states, were paramount.

<...> many national leaders including Washington, Franklin, Jefferson, Madison, Hamilton, John Adams, John Jay, Gouverneur Morris, and Rufus King saw American slavery as an immense problem, a curse, a blight, or a national disease. If the degree of their revulsion varied, they agreed that the nation would be much safer, purer, happier, and better off without the racial slavery that they had inherited from previous generations and, some of them would emphasize, from England. Most of them also believed that America would be an infinitely better and less complicated place without the African American population, which most white leaders associated with all the defects, mistakes, sins, shortcomings, and animality of an otherwise almost perfect nation.

And among the things most odious to my mind is to find a man who enters upon a public office, under the sanction of the Constitution, and taking an oath to support the Constitution—the compact between the States binding each for the common defense and general welfare of the other—and retaining to himself a mental reservation that he will war upon the institutions and the property of any of the States of the Union. It is a crime too low to characterize as it deserves before this assembly. It is one which would disgrace a gentleman—one which a man with self-respect would never commit. To swear that he will support the Constitution, to take an office which belongs in many of its relations to all the States, and to use it as a means of injuring a portion of the States of whom he is thus an agent, is treason to everything that is honorable in man.

Ohio had achieved statehood in 1803, but it continued to grow dramatically, doubling in population from a quarter of a million to half a million in the decade following 1810. By 1820, it had actually become the fourth most populous state, exceeded only by New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia. Indiana and Illinois, admitted into the Union as states in 1816 and 1818, had respectively 147,000 and 55,000 people in the census of 1820.33 The southern parts of the three states were settled faster, because the Ohio River provided both a convenient highway for travelers and the promise of access to market. Most early settlers in this area came from the Upland South, the same Piedmont regions that supplied so many migrants to the Southwest. Often of Scots-Irish descent, they got nicknamed “Butternuts” from the color of their homespun clothing. The name “Hoosiers,” before its application to the people of Indiana, seems to have been a derogatory term for the dwellers in the southern backcountry.34 Among the early Hoosiers was Thomas Lincoln, who took his family, including seven-year-old Abraham, from Kentucky into Indiana in 1816. (Abraham Lincoln’s future antagonist Jefferson Davis, also born in Kentucky, traveled with his father, Samuel, down the Mississippi River in 1810, following another branch of the Great Migration.) Some of these settlers crossed the Ohio River because they resented having to compete with slave labor or disapproved of the institution on moral grounds; Thomas Lincoln shared both these antislavery attitudes. Other Butternuts, however, hoped to introduce slavery into their new home. In Indiana Territory, Governor William Henry Harrison, a Virginian, had led futile efforts to suspend the Northwest Ordinance prohibition against slavery. In Illinois, some slaveowners smuggled their bondsmen in under the guise of indentured servants, and as late as 1824 an effort to legalize slavery by changing the state constitution was only defeated by a vote of 6,600 to 5,000.35

General R. E. Lee, Commanding Army of Northern Virginia: Yours of the 8th instant has been received. I am glad to find that you concur so entirely with me as to the want of our country in this trying hour, and am happy to add that after the first depression consequent upon our disasters in the West, indications have appeared that our people will exhibit that fortitude which we agree in believing is alone needful to secure ultimate success. It well became Sidney Johnston, when overwhelmed by a senseless clamor, to admit the rule that success is the test of merit, and yet there has been nothing which I have found to require a greater effort of patience than to bear the criticisms of the ignorant, who pronounce everything a failure which does not equal their expectations or desires, and can see no good result which is not in the line of their own imaginings. I admit the propriety of your conclusions, that an officer who loses the confidence of his troops should have his position changed, whatever may be his ability; but when I read the sentence I was not at all prepared for the application you were about to make. Expressions of discontent in the public journals furnish but little evidence of the sentiment of an army.… But suppose, my dear friend, that I were to admit, with all their implications, the points which you present, where am I to find that new commander who is to possess the greater ability which you believe to be required? I do not doubt the readiness with which you would give way to one who could accomplish all that you have wished, and you will do me the justice to believe that if Providence should kindly offer such a person for our use, I would not hesitate to avail of his services. My sight is not sufficiently penetrating to discover such hidden merit, if it exists, and I have but used to you the language of sober earnestness when I have impressed upon you the propriety of avoiding all unnecessary exposure to danger, because I felt our country could not bear to lose you. To ask me to substitute you by someone in my judgment more fit to command, or who would possess more of the confidence of the army or of the reflecting men in the country, is to demand of me an impossibility. It only remains for me to hope that you will take all possible care of yourself, that your health and strength may be entirely restored, and that the Lord will preserve you for the important duties devolved upon you in the struggle of our suffering country for the independence which we have engaged in war to maintain. As ever, very respectfully and truly yours, JEFFERSON DAVIS

In America, the men who mounted a bloody war against the United States to keep the right to enslave humans for generations went on to live out their retirement in comfort. Confederate president Jefferson Davis went on to write his memoirs at a plantation in Mississippi that is now the site of his presidential library. Robert E. Lee became an esteemed college president. When they died, they were both granted state funerals with military honors and were revered with statues and monuments.

Will any candid, well-informed man assert that, at any time between 1776 and 1790, a proposition to surrender the sovereignty of the States

The Constitution expressly forbade any interference by Congress with the slave-trade—or,

No moral nor sentimental considerations were really involved in either the earlier or later controversies which so long agitated and finally ruptured the Union. They were simply struggles between different sections, with diverse institutions and interests.

or to add to the number of slaves.

Even though the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 ended slavery, it left a loophole that let the dominant caste enslave people convicted of a crime. This gave the dominant caste incentive to lock up lowest-caste people for subjective offenses like loitering or vagrancy at a time when free labor was needed in a penal system that the dominant caste alone controlled. After a decade of Reconstruction, just as African-Americans were seeking entry to mainstream society, the North abandoned its oversight of the South, pulled its occupying troops out of the region, and handed power back to the former rebels, leaving the survivors of slavery at the mercy of supremacist militias nursing wounds from the war. The federal government paid reparations not to the people who had been held captive, but rather to the people who had enslaved them. The former Confederates reinscribed a mutation of slavery in the form of sharecropping and an authoritarian regime that put people who had only recently emerged from slavery into a world of lynchings, night riders, and Klansmen, terrors meant to keep them subservient. As they foreclosed the hopes of African-Americans, they erected statues and monuments everywhere to the slave-owning Confederates, a naked forewarning to the lowest caste of its subjugation and powerlessness. It was psychic trolling of the first magnitude. People still raw from the trauma of floggings and family rupture, and the descendants of those people, were now forced to live amid monuments to the men who had gone to war to keep them at the level of livestock. To enter a courthouse to stand trial in a case that they were all but certain to lose, survivors of slavery had to pass statues of Confederate soldiers looking down from literal pedestals. They had to ride on roads named after the generals of their tormenters and walk past schools named after Klansmen. Well into the twentieth century, heirs to the Confederacy built a monument with Lee, Stonewall Jackson, and Jefferson Davis carved in granite, bigger than Mount Rushmore, in Stone Mountain, Georgia. If the Confederacy had lost the war, the culture of the South and the lives of the lowest caste did not reflect it. In fact, the return to power of the former Confederates meant retribution and even harder times to come.

It was in this spirit of patriotism and confidence in the continuance of such abiding good will as would for all time preclude hostile aggression, that Virginia ceded, for the use of the confederated States, all that vast extent of territory lying north of the Ohio River, out of which have since been formed five States and part of a sixth.

Mr. Seward, of New York, as we have seen, was a member of that Committee—the man who, in 1858, had announced the "irrepressible conflict," and who, in the same year, speaking of and for abolitionism, had said: "It has driven you back in California and in Kansas; it will invade your soil." He was to be the Secretary of State in the incoming Administration, and was very generally regarded as the "power behind the throne," greater than the throne itself.

It has been sometimes contended that, because the Congress of the Confederation, by the Ordinance of 1787, prohibited involuntary servitude in all the Northwestern Territory, the framers of the Constitution must have recognized such power to exist in the Congress of the United States. Hence the deduction that the prohibitory clause of what is known as the Missouri Compromise was justified by the precedent of the Ordinance of 1787.

It was added that the "true intent and meaning" of the act was "not to legislate slavery into any Territory or State, nor to exclude it therefrom, but to leave the people thereof perfectly free to form and regulate their domestic institutions in their own way, subject only to the Constitution of the United States.

The climate of Kansas and Nebraska was altogether unsuited to the negro, and the soil was not adapted to those productions for which negro labor could be profitably employed. If, then, any negroes held to service or labor, as provided in the compact of union, had been transported to those Territories, they would have been such as were bound by personal attachment mutually existing between master and servant, which would have rendered it impossible for the former to consider the latter as property convertible into money.

On the other hand, the party originally known as Republican, and afterward as Democratic, can scarcely claim to have been distinctively or exclusively such in the primary sense of these terms, inasmuch as no party has ever avowed opposition to the general principles of government by the people. The fundamental idea of the Democratic party was that of the sovereignty of the States and the federal, or confederate, character of the Union.

Those of the South had no material cause of complaint; but, actuated by sympathy for their Northern brethren, and a devotion to the principles of civil liberty and community independence, which they had inherited from their Anglo-Saxon ancestry, and which were set forth in the Declaration of Independence, they made common cause with their neighbors, and may, at least, claim to have done their full share in the war that ensued.

The effects of discriminating duties upon imports have been referred to in a former chapter—favoring the manufacturing region, which was the North; burdening the exporting region, which was the South; and so imposing upon the latter a double tax:

This became distinctly manifest when the so-called "Republican" Convention assembled in Chicago, on May 16, 1860, to nominate a candidate for the Presidency. It was a purely sectional body. There were a few delegates present, representing an insignificant minority in the "border States," Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, Kentucky, and Missouri; but not one from any State south of the celebrated political line of thirty-six degrees thirty minutes.

The Convention representing the conservative, or State-Rights, wing of the Democratic-party (the President of which was the Hon. Caleb Cushing, of Massachusetts), on the first ballot, unanimously made choice of John C. Breckinridge, of Kentucky, then Vice-President of the United States, for the first office, and with like unanimity selected General Joseph Lane, then a Senator from Oregon, for the second.

These conventions, as it was always held and understood, possessed all the power of the people assembled in mass; and therefore it was conceded that they, and they only, could take action for the withdrawal of a State from the Union. The consent of the respective States to the formation of the Union had been given through such conventions, and it was only by the same authority that it could properly be revoked

Like all who had intelligently and impartially studied the history of the formation of the Constitution, he held that the Federal Government had no rightful power to coerce a State. Like the sages and patriots who had preceded him in the high office that he filled, he believed that "our Union rests upon public opinion, and can never by cemented by the blood of its citizens shed in civil war. If it can not live in the affections of the people, it must one day perish. Congress may possess many means of preserving it by conciliation, but the sword was not placed in their hand to preserve it by force."—(Message of December 3, 1860.)

How can the Union be saved?" He answered his question thus: "There is but one way by which it can be [saved] with any certainty; and that is by a full and final settlement, on the principles of justice, of all the questions at issue between the sections. The South asks for justice—simple justice—and less she ought not to take. She has no compromise to offer but the Constitution, and no concession or surrender to make.... "Can this be done? Yes, easily! Not by the weaker party; for it can of itself do nothing—not even protect itself—but by the stronger.... But will the North agree to do this? It is for her to answer this question. But, I will say, she can not refuse if she has half the love of the Union which she professes to have, nor without exposing herself to the charge that her love of power and aggrandizement is far greater than her love of the Union.

With very rare exceptions, there were none in 1850 who claimed the right of the Federal Government to apply coercion to a State. In 1860 men had grown to be familiar with threats of driving the South into submission to any act that the Government, in the hands of a Northern majority, might see fit to perform. During the canvass of that year, demonstrations had been made by quasi-military organizations in various parts of the North, which looked unmistakably to purposes widely different from those enunciated in the preamble to the Constitution, and to the employment of means not authorized by the powers which the States had delegated to the Federal Government. Well-informed men still remembered that, in the Convention which framed the Constitution, a proposition was made to authorize the employment of force against a delinquent State, on which Mr. Madison remarked that "the use of force against a State would look more like a declaration of war than an infliction of punishment, and would probably be considered by the party attacked as a dissolution of all previous compacts by which it might have been bound.

Notable among such was the "New York Tribune," which had been the organ of the abolitionists, and which now declared that, "if the cotton States wished to withdraw from the Union, they should be allowed to do so"; that "any attempt to compel them to remain, by force, would be contrary to the principles of the Declaration of Independence and to the fundamental ideas upon which human liberty is based"; and that, "if the Declaration of Independence justified the secession from the British Empire of three millions of subjects in 1776, it was not seen why it would not justify the secession of five millions of Southerners from the Union in 1861.

The knowledge acquired by the administration of the War Department for four years, and by the chairmanship of the Military Committee of the Senate at two different periods, still longer in combined duration, had shown me the entire lack of preparation for war in the South. The foundries and armories were in the Northern States, and there were stored all the new and improved weapons of war. In the arsenals of the Southern States were to be found only arms of the old and rejected models. The South had no manufactories of powder, and no navy to protect our harbors, no merchant-ships for foreign commerce. It was evident to me, therefore, that, if we should be involved in war, the odds against us would be far greater than what was due merely to our inferiority in population.

It has been fully shown that the States which thus became and continued to be "united," whatever form their union assumed, acted and continued to act as distinct and sovereign political communities. The monstrous fiction that they acted as one people "in their aggregate capacity" has not an atom of fact to serve as a basis. To go back to the very beginning, the British colonies never constituted one people.

the true idea intended to be embodied in the title—les États Unis, or los Estados Unidos—the States united. It was without any change of title—still as "United States"—without any sacrifice of individuality—without any compromise of sovereignty—that the same parties entered into a new and amended compact with one another under the present Constitution

In the election of President and Vice-President the Constitution (Article II) prescribes that "each State shall appoint, in such manner as the Legislature thereof may direct, a number of electors" for the purpose of choosing a President and Vice-President.

and their theoretical plan of separation corresponds very nearly with that actually adopted by the Southern States nearly fifty years afterward. They say: "If the Union be destined to dissolution by reason of the multiplied abuses of bad administration, it should, if possible, be the work of peaceable times and deliberate consent. Some new form of confederacy should be substituted among those States which shall intend to maintain a federal relation to each other. Events may prove that the causes of our calamities are deep and permanent. They may be found to proceed, not merely from the blindness of prejudice, pride of opinion, violence of party spirit, or the confusion of the times; but they may be traced to implacable combinations of individuals or of States to monopolize power and office, and to trample without remorse upon the rights and interests of commercial sections of the Union. Whenever it shall appear that the causes are radical and permanent, a separation by equitable arrangement will be preferable to an alliance by constraint among nominal friends, but real enemies.

Again, in 1844-'45 the measures taken for the annexation of Texas evoked remonstrances, accompanied by threats of a dissolution of the Union from the Northeastern States. The Legislature of Massachusetts, in 1844, adopted a resolution, declaring, in behalf of that State, that "the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, faithful to the compact between the people of the United States, according to the plain meaning and intent in which it was understood by them, is sincerely anxious for its preservation; but that it is determined, as it doubts not the other States are, to submit to undelegated powers in no body of men on earth"; and that "the project of the annexation of Texas, unless arrested on the threshold, may tend to drive these States into a dissolution of the Union.

It is evident, therefore, that the people of the South, in the crisis which confronted them in 1860, had no lack either of precept or of precedent for their instruction and guidance in the teaching and the example of our brethren of the North and East. The only practical difference was, that the North threatened and the South acted.

The Southern States and Southern people have been sedulously represented as "propagandists" of slavery, and the Northern as the defenders and champions of universal freedom, and this view has been so arrogantly assumed, so dogmatically asserted, and so persistently reiterated, that its authors have, in many cases, perhaps, succeeded in bringing themselves to believe it, as well as in impressing it widely upon the world.

The African slave-trade was carried on almost exclusively by New England merchants and Northern ships. Mr. Jefferson—a Southern man, the founder of the Democratic party, and the vindicator of State rights—was in theory a consistent enemy to every form of slavery. The Southern States took the lead in prohibiting the slave-trade, and, as we have seen, one of them (Georgia) was the first State to incorporate such a prohibition in her organic Constitution.

Instead of accepting the decision of this then august tribunal—the ultimate authority in the interpretation of constitutional questions—as conclusive of a controversy that had so long disturbed the peace and was threatening the perpetuity of the Union, it was flouted, denounced, and utterly disregarded by the Northern agitators, and served only to stimulate the intensity of their sectional hostility.

After long and patient consideration of the case, in 1857, the decision of the Court was pronounced in an elaborate and exhaustive opinion, delivered by Chief-Justice Taney—a man eminent as a lawyer, great as a statesman, and stainless in his moral reputation—seven of the nine judges who composed the Court, concurring in it. The salient points established by this decision were: 1. That persons of the African race were not, and could not be, acknowledged as "part of the people," or citizens, under the Constitution of the United States; 2. That Congress had no right to exclude citizens of the South from taking their negro servants, as any other property, into any part of the common territory, and that they were entitled to claim its protection therein; 3. And, finally, as a consequence of the principle just above stated, that the Missouri Compromise of 1820, in so far as it prohibited the existence of African servitude north of a designated line, was unconstitutional and void. 28 (It will be remembered that it had already been declared "inoperative and void" by the Kansas-Nebraska Bill of 1854.)

They were subject to the British Crown, unless, like the Plymouth colony, "a law unto themselves," but they were independent of each other—the only point which has any bearing upon their subsequent relations. There was no other bond between them than that of their common allegiance to the Government of the mother-country. As an illustration of this may be cited the historical fact that, when John Stark, of Bennington memory, was before the Revolution engaged in a hunting expedition in the Indian country, he was captured by the savages and brought to Albany, in the colony of New York, for a ransom; but, inasmuch as he belonged to New Hampshire, the government of New York took no action for his release.

but the Constitution, in the second section of its first article, expressly declares that it "shall be composed of members chosen by the people of the several States.

The misconception is so palpable as scarcely to admit of serious answer. The Declaration of Independence opens with a general proposition. "One people" is equivalent to saying "any people.

The other citation of Mr. Everett is from the first sentence of the Declaration of Independence: "When in the course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another," etc., etc. This, he says, characterizes "the good people" of the colonies as "one people.

Elizabeth Keckley, who had worked as a maid for Davis, thought singling him out for punishment was simply irrelevant to the noble cause that had prompted her to leave his service. “The years have brought many changes,” she reflected; “and in view of these terrible changes even I, who was once a slave, who have been punished with the cruel lash, who have experienced the heart and soul tortures of a slave’s life, can say to Mr. Jefferson Davis, ‘Peace! you have suffered! Go in peace.’ ” Regardless of how blacks had viewed the war, most of them could concur with the idea of amnesty for Jefferson Davis, if only because they intended to remain in a society made up largely of people of his color and outlook.

It is worth noting that the first statement of the salvation covenant speaks in terms of families rather than isolated individuals or nation-states. The heavenly Father, "from whom every family in heaven and on earth is named" (Eph. 3:15), desires that the family structure, so basic to human society and yet now so marked by the effects of sin, should be a primary sphere for the revelation of the redeeming action of his grace. This family emphasis, so prominent in the Scriptures, has not always been adequately recognized in evangelical understanding of the plan of salvation.

The statement that Abraham's descendants shall "possess the gate of their enemies" is the promise of spiritual and cultural dominance of the godly covenant people.

[T]he many Gentile proselytes to Judaism provided a natural point of contact for the apostle's evangelistic endeavors. Paul's preaching in the synagogues and in public places led to the gathering of house churches in the various cities which were the focus of his mission. Paul's basic mission strategy, in fact, relied significantly on establishing a Christian fellowship in a household of some size and from there working out into others in the town. The Christian community at Corinth, for example, seemed to be made up of a number of house churches. Paul baptized the households of Crispus, Gaius, and Stephanas, all of some social standing (1 Cor. 1:14-16). These early house churches had the merit of integrating Christian faith into the context of the people's daily lives, rather than merely into an institutional setting.

In retrospect this period of Roman Catholic missionary expansion represents a mixed picture. Christianity did spread far beyond the borders of Europe and the Mediterranean basin as a result, but at the cost of being inextricably associated with Western colonialism in the minds of the subject peoples. This same problem of disentangling the essentials of Christian faith from its Western political and cultural trappings was also to face Protestant missionaries in succeeding centuries.

Significantly, in Luke 4:18-19...the Lord reads from the Isaiah scroll, but stops at 61:2a ("the acceptable year of the Lord"), and omits 61:2b ("the day of vengeance of our God").

The foregoing observations...suggest that influences other than purely exegetical ones can affect the church's outlook....Church history also suggests that eschatological positions can significantly influence the church's understanding of the nature and scope of its mission to the world.

According to Robert S. McNamara, former president of the World Bank, without firm action to further reduce the population growth rate, world population will not stabilize below eleven billion. "At the national level," states McNamara, "rapid population growth translates into a steadily worsening employment future, massive city growth, pressure on food supplies, degradation of the environment, an increase in the number of 'absolute poor,' and a stimulus to authoritarian government.

In the postmillennial framework the key to the church's hope is faith in the sovereignty of God and the power of the Spirit, not in world conditions as such.

Postmillennialism is an eschatological outlook that anticipates a period of unprecedented revival in the church prior to the return of Christ, resulting from new outpourings of the Holy Spirit. This great revival is expected to be characterized by the church's numerical expansion and spiritual vitality. As a secondary result of the growing influence of Christian values, the world as a whole is expected to experience conditions of significant peace and economic improvement.

After a Richmond slave denounced Jefferson Davis and refused to serve any white man, a local editor demanded that he “be whipped every day until he confesses what white man put these notions in his head.” There had to be an explanation which slaveholding families could accept without in any way compromising their self-esteem or the fundamental conviction that slavery was the best possible condition for black people. To pretend that the Yankees instigated slave aggression and enticed and forced slaves to desert their masters proved to be a highly popular explanation, since it contained a semblance of truth and conveniently evaded the hard questions. “The poor negroes don’t do us any harm except when they are put up to it,” Eliza Andrews thought. “Even when they murdered that white man and quartered him, I believe pernicious teachings were responsible.

When our fathers dissolved their connection with Great Britain, by declaring themselves free and independent States, they constituted thirteen separate communities, and were careful to assert and preserve, each for itself, its sovereignty and jurisdiction.

In all free governments the constitution or organic law is supreme over the government, and in our Federal Union this was most distinctly marked by limitations and prohibitions against all which was beyond the expressed grants of power to the General Government. In the foreground, therefore, I take the position that those who resisted violations of the compact were the true friends, and those who maintained the usurpation of undelegated powers were the real enemies of the constitutional Union.

It is well known that, at the time of the adoption of the Federal Constitution, African servitude existed in all the States that were parties to that compact, unless with the single exception of Massachusetts, in which it had, perhaps, very recently ceased to exist.